"I stand for the unflinching maintenance of all American rights on land and sea."
In order to understand the force of that statement at the time it was spoken, we must remember how each faction during the period of neutrality believed that the nations it opposed in Europe were alone violating American rights. Mr. Hughes seemed to say to the pro-Allies: I would have coerced Germany. But the pro-Germans had been insisting that British sea power was violating most of our rights. The formula covers two diametrically opposed purposes by the symbolic phrase "American rights."
But there was the Lusitania. Like the 1912 schism, it was an invincible obstacle to harmony.
"… I am confident that there would have been no destruction of
American lives by the sinking of the Lusitania."
Thus, what cannot be compromised must be obliterated, when there is a question on which we cannot all hope to get together, let us pretend that it does not exist. About the future of American relations with Europe Mr. Hughes was silent. Nothing he could say would possibly please the two irreconcilable factions for whose support he was bidding.
It is hardly necessary to say that Mr. Hughes did not invent this technic and did not employ it with the utmost success. But he illustrated how a public opinion constituted out of divergent opinions is clouded; how its meaning approaches the neutral tint formed out of the blending of many colors. Where superficial harmony is the aim and conflict the fact, obscurantism in a public appeal is the usual result. Almost always vagueness at a crucial point in public debate is a symptom of cross-purposes.
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But how is it that a vague idea so often has the power to unite deeply felt opinions? These opinions, we recall, however deeply they may be felt, are not in continual and pungent contact with the facts they profess to treat. On the unseen environment, Mexico, the European war, our grip is slight though our feeling may be intense. The original pictures and words which aroused it have not anything like the force of the feeling itself. The account of what has happened out of sight and hearing in a place where we have never been, has not and never can have, except briefly as in a dream or fantasy, all the dimensions of reality. But it can arouse all, and sometimes even more emotion than the reality. For the trigger can be pulled by more than one stimulus.
The stimulus which originally pulled the trigger may have been a series of pictures in the mind aroused by printed or spoken words. These pictures fade and are hard to keep steady; their contours and their pulse fluctuate. Gradually the process sets in of knowing what you feel without being entirely certain why you feel it. The fading pictures are displaced by other pictures, and then by names or symbols. But the emotion goes on, capable now of being aroused by the substituted images and names. Even in severe thinking these substitutions take place, for if a man is trying to compare two complicated situations, he soon finds exhausting the attempt to hold both fully in mind in all their detail. He employs a shorthand of names and signs and samples. He has to do this if he is to advance at all, because he cannot carry the whole baggage in every phrase through every step he takes. But if he forgets that he has substituted and simplified, he soon lapses into verbalism, and begins to talk about names regardless of objects. And then he has no way of knowing when the name divorced from its first thing is carrying on a misalliance with some other thing. It is more difficult still to guard against changelings in casual politics.
For by what is known to psychologists as conditioned response, an emotion is not attached merely to one idea. There are no end of things which can arouse the emotion, and no end of things which can satisfy it. This is particularly true where the stimulus is only dimly and indirectly perceived, and where the objective is likewise indirect. For you can associate an emotion, say fear, first with something immediately dangerous, then with the idea of that thing, then with something similar to that idea, and so on and on. The whole structure of human culture is in one respect an elaboration of the stimuli and responses of which the original emotional capacities remain a fairly fixed center. No doubt the quality of emotion has changed in the course of history, but with nothing like the speed, or elaboration, that has characterized the conditioning of it.